In Iran Nuke Talks, Ehud Barak Is the Man to Watch

May 15 (Bloomberg) -- When U.S. President Barack Obama
dispatches his negotiators to Baghdad next week to join talks
with Iran over the future of its nuclear program, he’ll be most
concerned about the reaction of one man: Israeli Defense
Minister Ehud Barak.

Obama believes that Barak, and not Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, is the Israeli leader agitating most vociferously for
a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a strike the
Obama administration thinks would be grossly premature and quite
possibly catastrophic. (Your humble columnist concurs with this
assessment.)

If Barak sees these talks as productive -- especially in
light of evidence that the U.S. and its allies are doing a
credible job of keeping Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold
-- then Obama will have successfully pushed off an Israeli
strike, at least until after the U.S. presidential election in
November.

Barak has made clear that he seeks one thing above all in
the nuclear talks: for Iran to shut down its formerly secret
nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo, near the city of Qom.
Obama has made Barak’s preoccupation with Fordo his own.

Zone of Immunity

It’s not hard to see why both men see Fordo as a crucial
component of Iran’s nuclear program. Once Iran moves its
enrichment program to Fordo -- which is built inside a mountain
and has hardened defenses against nearly all conventional
munitions -- it will probably have entered a “zone of immunity,”
in which Israel would no longer be able to cripple its
centrifuges. (The Israelis, like the Obama administration and
many international experts, don’t doubt that Iran would seek to
build a nuclear weapon if political and technical conditions
allowed for it.)

For Barak, keeping Iran outside the zone of immunity is
paramount. If Iran moves its nuclear program beyond the reach of
the Israeli air force, Netanyahu and Barak believe they will
have outsourced the security of their nation to the U.S., which
has more advanced weaponry. But in Barak’s estimation, the U.S.
has gone 0-2 in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons
to hostile, unstable countries. Pakistan and North Korea both
built and tested nuclear weapons over U.S. objections. Barak has
pointed out that Israel is 2-0 in the same arena, having
destroyed nuclear facilities in both Iraq and Syria from the
air.

If he thinks Iran -- a country whose government advocates
the destruction of Israel -- is close to immunizing itself
against a preventative Israeli attack, he will argue for an
immediate strike. By some estimates, work on the hardening of
Fordo continues at a steady pace.

In the past three years, Obama has intensified pressure on
Iran in ways that have forced the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, who has ultimate authority over Iran’s nuclear
program, to make at least semi-positive noises about compromise.
Thanks to an international effort orchestrated by Obama to
isolate the regime, tankers loaded with Iranian oil are sitting
off the country’s coast -- with no buyers to be found.

Obama doesn’t believe that the Iranians will rush to
compromise before sanctions go into full effect on July 1. But
there is a plausible chance that Iran could reach an agreement
with the other countries at the Baghdad talks -- known as P5+1 -
- and promise to shutter the Fordo facility.

If this happened, then Barak would be at least partially
happy. Because Barak doesn’t actually want to strike Iran this
year -- he wants to maintain the ability to strike Iran next
year, and the year after that.

Buying Time

Obama has studied Barak and Netanyahu carefully. He’s fully
aware that Barak was Netanyahu’s commander in the Israeli army,
and he understands that Netanyahu often defers to Barak on
matters of security. Although a sharp-taloned hawk on Iran,
Barak is a former leader of Israel’s Labor Party and generally
in ideological harmony with Obama. He is also far less apt to
lecture Obama on the imperatives of history, and more likely to
engage in practical discussions about ways to derail Iran’s
nuclear ambitions.

Which is why the Baghdad talks are so crucial. Obama thinks
they could buy him substantial time with Israel, as he works
over the coming months to convince Khamenei that his nuclear
program is folly. But if the talks fail to persuade Iran to
close the Fordo facility, then Barak and Netanyahu -- who now
sit atop a powerful coalition government -- could be moving
again toward a strike.

(Jeffrey Goldberg is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
national correspondent for the Atlantic. The opinions expressed
are his own.)

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